Over the years, I have had the privilege of
meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from
countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and
former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how
the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these
people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and
point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite
incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need
to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is,
undeniably, the best in the world.

"How can that be?" I asked, honestly puzzled.

Propaganda in those countries was too
obvious, they told me. As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it
was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you
heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda,
and you tuned it out.

"But," I then queried, "How do you know when
it’s just propaganda?"

The expatriates explained that bad propaganda
uses obvious terminology that anyone can see through. Anyone hearing the
phrase "capitalist running dogs", knows he’s listening to incompetent
propaganda and tunes it out. Lousy propaganda, these knowledgeable but
jaded individuals would tell me, appeals to an abstract theory, to a
rational thesis that can be disproved. Even though communists had total
control of the press, the people just tuned it out (except for those who
were the most mentally defective). Most people, they assured me, just went
about their lives as best they could, paid lip service to the state, and
just tried to keep out of the way of the secret police. But hardly anyone
really believed the stuff. The result, after many decades of suffering,
was the eventual collapse of the old order once The Great Leader expired,
whether his name was Brezhnev, Mao, or Tito.

American propaganda, however, is much
cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies entirely
on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be
disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to.

American propaganda had its birth, so far as
I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising—a
truly loathsome bunch—learned early on that people would respond to purely
emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur
sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of
falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising
executives. A man walking down the street with beautiful women hanging on
his arms is not a logical argument, but it sure sells after-shave. A woman
in a business suit with a briefcase, strolling along with swaying hips,
assuring us she can "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but never
let you forget you’re a man" really sells the perfume.

Let’s take a moment and analyze the
particular emotions that this execrable ad appealed to. If you guessed
fear, you win the prize. Women often have a fear of inadequacy,
particularly in this confused age when they are expected to raise
brilliant kids, run a successful business, and be unfailingly sexy, all
the time. That silly goal—foisted upon us by feminists and popular
culture—is impossible to reach. But maybe there’s hope if you buy the
right perfume! Arguments from intimidation and appeals to fear are
powerful propaganda tools.

American advertising and propaganda has been
refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption
that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion. When I worked
at an ad agency many years ago, I learned that the successful agencies
know how to appeal to emotions: the stronger and baser, the better. The
seven deadly sins, ad agency wags often say, are the key to selling
products. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools
for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful
motivating emotion—the top, most-sought-after copy writers will tell you,
in an unguarded moment—is fear, followed closely by greed.

Good propaganda appeals to neither logic nor
morality. Morality and ethics are the death of sales. This is why
communist propaganda actually hastened the collapse of communism: the
creatures running the Commie Empire thought they should appeal to morality
by calling for people to engage in sacrifice for the greater good. They
gave endless, droning speeches about the inevitably of communist triumph,
based on the Hegelian dialectic. Not only were they wrong: their approach
to selling their (virtually unsellable) theory was not clever enough.
American propagandists (we can be jingoistically proud to say) would have
been able to maintain the absurd social experiment called communism a
little longer. They would have scrapped all the theory and focused on
appealing images. Though the Commies tried to do this through huge,
flag-waving rallies, the disparity between their alleged ideals and the
reality they created was just too great.

One tyrant who did take American propaganda
to heart was Adolph Hitler. Hitler learned to admire American propaganda
through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing
detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This
American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstängl,
told the Führer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through
blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy. Hitler, genius
of evil as he was, immediately saw the value in this form of propaganda
and incorporated it into his own rise to power. Prior to Hitler, German
political rhetoric was dry, intellectual, and uninspiring. Hitler learned
the value of spectacle in whipping up the emotions; the famed Nuremberg
rallies were really little more than glorified football halftime shows.
Rejecting boring, intellectual rhetoric, Hitler learned to appeal to
deeply emotional but meaningless phrases, like the appeal to "blood and
soil." The German people bought it wholesale. Hitler also called for blind
loyalty to the "Fatherland," which eerily echoes our own new cabinet level
post of "Homeland" Security.

If you study Nazi propaganda, you will be
struck by how well it appeals to gut-level emotions and images—but not
thought. You will see pictures of elderly German women hugging fresh-faced
young babies, with captions about the bright future the Führer has brought
to German. In fact, German propaganda borrowed the American technique of
relying, not so much on words, but on images alone: pictures of handsome
German soldiers, sturdy peasants in native costume, and the like. Take a
look at any American car commercial featuring rugged farmers tossing bales
of hay into the backs of their pickups, and you’ve seen the source from
which the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques.

The Germans have a well-deserved reputation
for producing a lot of really smart people, but this did not prevent them
from being completely vulnerable to American-style propaganda. Amazingly,
a nation raised on the greatest classical music, the profoundest
scientists, the greatest poets, actually fell for propaganda that led them
into a hopeless, two-front war against most of the world. Being smart is,
in itself, no defense against skilled American propaganda, unless you know
and understand the techniques, so you can resist them.

American politicians learned, early in the
twentieth century, that using emotional sales techniques won elections.
Furthermore, they learned that emotional appeals got them what they wanted
as they advanced towards their long-term goal of becoming Masters of the
Universe. From this, we get our modern lexicon of political speech,
carefully crafted to appeal to powerful emotions, with either no appeal to
reason, or (better yet) a vague appeal to something that sounds foggily
reasonable, but is so obscure that no one will bother to dissect it.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this, which is
why he called for Social Security. Security is an emotional appeal: no one
is against security, are they? Roosevelt backed up his campaign with a
masterful appeal to emotions: images of happy, elderly grandparents
smiling while hugging their grandchildren, with everything in the world
going right because of Social Security. All kinds of government programs
were sold on the basis of appealing images and phrases. Roosevelt even
appealed to America’s traditional love of freedom, spinning that term by
multiplying it into the new Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and
Freedom from Fear. Well, what heartless human being could possibly be
against that? The Four Freedoms were promoted with images of parents
tucking their children cozily into bed, and a happy family gathered around
a Thanksgiving dinner, obviously free from want. The campaign was also
based on that most powerful of all selling emotions: fear. If you don’t
support Social Security, the ads suggested, you will live your last years
in utter destitution.

American advertising executives learned the
value of presenting a single image or slogan, and repeating it over and
over again until it became ingrained in the public’s consciousness. Thus
we are all aware that Ivory Soap is so pure that it floats: a point that
has been repeated for the better part of a century. I’m not sure why I
should be impressed that a bar of soap floats, but on the other hand, it’s
not intended that I think that far. Politicians now sell their programs
the way the advertising creeps sell soap: they dream up a slogan and
repeat it over and over again. Thus we get empty slogans like The New
Frontier, The New World Order (that one was poorly chosen; it sounds too
much like an actual idea), or Reinventing Government (an idea that
everyone should favor, except that the idea behind it really means Keeping
Government the Same, only no one is supposed to think that far). Empty
grandeur sells political products.

Both German and American politicians carried
the use of banners to new heights. Flags are impressive emotional symbols,
particularly when waved by thousands of enthusiastic people: it’s a rare
individual who can resist the collective enthusiasm of thousands of his
fellow human beings, cheering about their collective greatness. Putzi
Hanfstängl understood this, advising Hitler to fill his public spectacles
with not just a few, but countless thousands of swastika flags. The
swastika, too, was a brilliant stroke of advertising and propaganda: it
has become, in the public consciousness, the official emblem of Nazism,
even though it had nothing to do with Germany. In fact, swastikas were
used by ancient Hindus and American tribes, but I’m not aware of it being
used by anyone in Germany prior to Hitler.

Now observe how Americans in the current
crisis have taken to displaying huge flags on their cars. Flags are not
rational arguments; they are instruments for whipping up the Madness of
Crowds. Observe how many Americans have, with a straight face, called for
a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag desecration, oblivious to the
obvious contradictions such an amendment would have with the rest of the
Constitution. But again, if you learn nothing else about propaganda, learn
that it must not appeal to rationality.

Politicians don’t just use warm, fuzzy images
to sell us on the road to tyranny. They also need emotional appeals to
intimidate their enemies. Thus the small percentage of the population that
really does use thought and reason more than emotion must be demonized.
Roosevelt managed this with some masterful propaganda strokes. Those who
opposed him were Isolationists, and Malefactors of Great Wealth! (The
gut-level emotion appealed to here is envy.) Roosevelt thus showed himself
to be an early master of what former California Governor Jerry Brown
called "buzz words"; that is, words intended to silence counter-argument
by appealing to unassailable emotional images. No one is for Isolation,
and almost everyone reacts to an appeal to hate anyone who has a lot of
money. The latter appeal, of course, had great power during the Great
Depression, which Roosevelt managed to maintain for the entire length of
his presidency, all the while blaming others for its evils. Was this guy
an evil genius, or what?

The propaganda cleverness used in
successfully branding anti-war people as Isolationists is breathtaking.
After all, a rational person (ah, keep in mind, that’s not a common
individual) realizes that those who oppose war are the exact opposite of
isolationists. The Old Right at the time called for peaceful, commercial
relations with all nations, based on neutrality in foreign affairs. If
anything, those who oppose war and meddling in other countries’ affairs
are the opposite of Isolationists as they really stand for open,
profitable relationships with other countries. The people who stand for
such ideas do not "sell" them by means of strictly emotional appeals, so
they tend to lose the propaganda wars. When Roosevelt succeeded in
whipping the country up into a war-frenzy after steering us into the Pearl
Harbor fiasco, the Old Right realized their opposition to the war was
hopeless.

The role of the government propaganda camps
known as public schools cannot be discounted in all this. Schools are not
so much centers of learning as they are behavior conditioning camps in
which children are taught to be unquestioningly obedient to authority.
Since reason and morality are the death of propaganda, schools busy
themselves with systematically stunting students’ ability to reason and
think in moral terms. Because the government owns the propaganda camps,
it’s not surprising that the beneficiary of the propaganda is almost
always the government. Americans accept obvious absurdities because they
were drilled into their heads, year after year, in the government
propaganda camps until they became true and unquestionable. Thus, everyone
knows Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, even though the worst
depression years were precisely those in which he and his party controlled
every branch of government. Everyone knows Lincoln was a great president
because he saved "government by the people" and freed the slaves, even
though he became a war tyrant and only freed the slaves when it was
politically convenient to do so. Wilson, everyone knows, made the world
"safe for democracy", evidently by instituting a draft and getting America
involved in a European war that was fought for reasons no one to this day
can fathom. When minds are young and pliable—government experts understand
this principle—you can fill them with nonsense that is practically
impossible to root out. Laughable falsehoods in effect become true because
everyone knows them to be true.

Advertising executives learned, early on,
that companies could not be too obvious in using their propaganda. If
their agenda could be clearly seen, then it could also be rejected. The
answer to this problem was the American propaganda technique of the
"independent expert" and the "guy on the street." One of these appeals to
our timidity before authority, and the other to our smugness when dealing
with someone at or below our perceived social level. Of course, these two
techniques are really just two sides of the same coin. In product
advertising, sports heroes and celebrities are used to sell corn flakes
because no one would listen to the president of Kellogg telling us why
corn flakes are so good. In selling detergent, plain-looking housewives
are preferable to sexy models because they look just like us. In political
propaganda, "experts" are often trotted out to tell us, in convoluted,
circular reasoning, why minimum wage laws are really good for us, why a
little bit of inflation is good, or why we just can’t rely on the free
market for something so crucially important as education. Or, using the
"guy on the street" approach, we are told to support idiotic wars because
the common soldiers ("our boys"), cannot function unless they know we
stand united behind them. If the rare sensible person tries to argue
against war, he is accused of making things harder for "our boys."

This brings us to the latest iteration of
masterful American Propaganda: the War on Terrorism. Any attempt to
explain why the terrorists (crazed as they obviously were) felt motivated
to attack the World Trade Center is looked on as "siding with the
terrorists." Indeed, Ashcroft and Bush have said, in so many words, that
if you don’t support them in everything they do, you stand with the
terrorists. Ashcroft and Bush have evidently studied their propaganda
lessons from World War II, when Roosevelt silenced all opposition by
accusing anyone who stood against him of undermining the war effort.
Anyone who suggests we should not risk World War III by invading the
Middle East is alternately accused of siding with the terrorists, of
slandering the memory of those who died, or (of course) of not "standing
by our boys" in times of great need. It’s easy to feel alienated in a
nation of flag-wavers singing patriotic hymns. The fact that they are
marching lockstep to a world in which the government will monitor their
e-mail, snoop into their bank accounts, and eventually throw them in jail
for voicing opposition doesn’t seem to bother them one bit.

Now, most libertarians or otherwise
thoughtful people will react with dismay when told that most of their
fellow human beings react so unthinkingly to sock-you-in-the-gut emotional
propaganda. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of really thinking
things out. Most people really do buy perfume because of the emotional
imagery. Most people really do believe the "independent expert", whether
in politics or buying a car. Most people want to go with the crowd, or
follow the leader. To do otherwise requires independent thought and the
willingness to be ostracized, which is an unbearable psychological burden
for many.

If you want to take heart, remember that the
Vietnam War ended because a few people just continued to speak against it,
despite the overwhelming government propaganda for it. The fact that a lot
of the anti-war protesters were motivated by the wrong reasons (support of
commies), doesn’t matter in light of the fact they were able to turn the
tide. They were right, even if for the wrong reasons. If advocates of
freedom continue to speak against the creeping tyranny that our masters
justify on the phony grounds of the War on Terrorism, we might just be
able to prevent the transition from Republic to Empire. The thing about
propaganda is that, once it is exposed for what it is, no one listens
anymore. People tune it out, just as the slaves in Russia and China
learned to tune out their official propaganda.

Sometimes you hear something that changes your view of the
world forever. During the reign of Bush the Elder, I read an offhand
remark by a presidential agriculture adviser that
turned on a light in my brain and changed my way of looking at things.

When asked how the Bush administration planned to convince the
public that the nation's food supply was not tainted with pesticides, the
bureaucrat replied: "We plan to say it over and over for a number of
years."

After that, I began to notice that whenever an
advertiser or the government--anyone with an agenda to push-- wanted very much for
me to believe something, they usually did not bother with reasoned
arguments and logical explanations; they simply
started saying something very simple, something that didn't even necessarily
make sense, and they said it over and over and over.

During the eighties, . for example, one could not read a
newspaper or hear a broadcast news program without enduring several exposures to the government's "AIDS"
epithet-- "HIV, the
virus that causes AIDS." You've probably heard it ten thousand
times.

And you can gauge the effectiveness of this simple
"AIDS" campaign by the fact that
almost everyone now believes that "HIV causes AIDS," although no one has
yet proved that HIV causes AIDS . People believe in the "AIDS
virus" so strongly that they'll almost fight to defend it. The "AIDS"
virus epithet is propaganda at its finest--the triumph of endless
repetition over common sense.

Paul Weber, in "Propaganda: Nobody Does It Better Than
America," will give you many examples of how propaganda works.--Gene
Franks.

Paul Weber introduces himself:

During the day, I go about earning a living by managing a small
business. The rest of the time, I’m either writing or spending time with
my family. In other words, I’m the most dangerous type of revolutionary:
the normal-looking guy sitting next to you in the coffee shop, secretly
planning the destruction of everything sacred.

To be sure, I really don’t advocate obliterating every institution of
government. Just 98 percent of it.

I had a brief career in teaching, the most undignified occupation on
earth. I heard so many bromides every day from fellow teachers and
administrators, I thought I was drowning in Alka-Seltzer. Like this one:
"all children want to learn." Give me a break! Or this one: "all children
deserve a quality education." Not the ones I tried to teach! Most of them
were impervious to learning. Not that it was entirely their fault; after
all, they had been in the public education system for a decade —the poor,
brain-numbed creatures!

My first published novel, Transfiguration, will be available at
Xlibris.com and Amazon.com in the fall of 2001. My earlier novel,
Extinction Event, got shopped around all the major publishers for several
years before I realized that getting published by major publishers is not
the easiest thing in the world. Extinction Event will be available
in 2002, after I finish its 92nd rewrite.